She lives in a one-bedroom apartment in Richland Center,
surrounded by photos of her beloved daughter.

"I am quite happy here," she said.

She was seated in her living room, having positioned herself
away from the window. The sunlight hurts her eyes.

She was asked: "Do your neighbors know your background?"

"I don't know," she said. "Probably they will now."

Lana Peters, 84, is the only daughter of Josef Stalin, the
brutal dictator of the Soviet Union who died in 1953.

Her defection to the United States in 1967 - when she was known
as Svetlana Alliluyeva - made headlines around the world.

Peters first came to Wisconsin in 1970, and while she has lived
elsewhere, sometimes for extended periods, she has always returned.
She moved to Richland Center from Spring Green within the past
three years.

Peters is a small woman. She uses a cane and has some difficulty
walking, but her mind is lively. She smiles often. She likes to sew
and read, mostly non-fiction. She listens to public radio and
doesn't own a television set.

While insisting she is not reclusive, Peters rarely gives
interviews. She granted this one, she said, because she wanted to
try to clarify a comment attributed to her - taken from a
documentary film on her life - that appeared in an Associated Press
story in Monday's Wisconsin State Journal.

The film, "Svetlana About Svetlana," directed by Lana Parshina,
plays the Wisconsin Film Festival on Sunday.

Lana about Svetlana

Parshina interviewed Peters in Spring Green in the summer of
2007. According to the Associated Press story on the film, Peters
talks in "Svetlana About Svetlana" of how, in retrospect, she might
have been better off living in a neutral country, like Switzerland,
rather than coming to the United States.

This week, Peters said she's glad to be here.

"I am quite well and happy," she said. "Richland Center has a
hospital and good social services for seniors."

Peters continued: "I have an American-born daughter. The only
unhappiness of my life is that I would like to live closer to
her."

The daughter, Olga, who now goes by the name Chrese Evans, lives
in Portland, Ore.

The daughter was the result of Peters' 1970 marriage to William
Wesley Peters, an apprentice of Frank Lloyd Wright.

It was through Wright's widow at Taliesin that Peters met her
future husband. After her defection to the United States, she said,
Olgivanna Lloyd Wright invited her to visit Taliesin West in
Arizona and Taliesin in Spring Green.

"I was snowed by letters of invitation," she said. "For six
months they kept inviting me. I was never very anxious in the
beginning. Finally I could not refuse her because she was an old
lady and she wrote me very sweet letters."

The payoff was a whirlwind romance - just a few weeks - ending
in a brief marriage to Wes Peters, and a daughter.

Peters thinks now that she was invited to Taliesin because it
was thought she had personal wealth through her late father.

"This is completely ridiculous," she said. "My father was a very
old-fashioned man. He believed that children should have no money.
He never gave, even allowance, to me or my brothers. He lived
completely on state expense. He never acquired private wealth."

Stalin a tough father

Peters was asked if she thinks often of her father.

"No," she said. "He broke my life. I want to explain to you. He
broke my life twice."

She said she had fallen in love with an older man, a writer and
filmmaker named Aleksei Kapler. Her father did not approve.

"I was 17," she said. "He put to jail, and then to labor camp,
the man who I loved. I saw for the first time that my father could
do that."

Kapler had introduced her to the arts - giving her books, taking
her to galleries - and Peters said the second time her father
"broke" her life came when she applied at a university to study the
arts.

Josef Stalin scoffed. "Bohemians," Peters recalled him saying.
"You want to be with Bohemians?" He insisted she study history and
become "an educated Marxist."

Peters was asked: "Do you think your father loved you?"

"Oh, yes," she said. "I looked like his mother. I had this red
hair, which I still have. It's not colored. It's my own hair. I
have freckles all over, like her."

She continued: "He was a very simple man. Very rude. Very cruel.
There was nothing in him that was complicated. He was very simple
with us. He loved me and he wanted me to be with him and become an
educated Marxist."

She said her father could never imagine her living outside of
Russia, but she has, for 43 years, apart from two years in the
1980s when she moved back.

Home

Now Richland Center is home. "I have many friends here," she
said. "People who I recognize."

She wouldn't mind relocating to Portland to be nearer her
daughter, Peters said. But moving is expensive and her daughter
enjoys coming to Wisconsin to visit.

They speak most nights on the phone. The Associated Press story
Monday said Peters' daughter worries that the documentary film is
an invasion of her mother's privacy, but Peters has reconciled
herself to one unshakable reality of her life.

"Wherever I go," she said, "here, or Switzerland, or India, or
wherever. Australia. Some island. I always will be a political
prisoner of my father's name."

Contact Doug Moe at 608-252-6446 or dmoe@madison.com. His
column appears Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday. For more
coverage of the Wisconsin Film Festival, visit
77Square.com/movies.

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Lana Peters — who was known internationally by her previous
name, Svetlana Alliluyeva — died of colon cancer Nov. 22 in
Wisconsin, where she lived off and on after becoming a U.S.
citizen, Richland County Coroner Mary Turner said Monday.

Lana Peters, the only daughter and last surviving child of
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, died of colon cancer Nov. 22 in
Richland County. Peters was 85 and had lived in Richland Center for
the past several years.